Carrion Eaters

The private dining room of Zann’s Gastronomy was opulent in the kind of timeless way that only money can make look trendy in a decade. A lone business-man sat at the massive live oak table, thoughtlessly popping a canape into his mouth from a silver tray as he scrolled through a text message on his smartwatch. He smiled as he turned to the singular entryway, a mahogany door stained black on the opposite side of the room, seconds before it burst open to the sight of flailing converse.

A burly man came into the room, man-handling a much smaller figure cloaked in an oversized black hoodie. As her feet touched the white marble, they squeaked loudly as they slipped across the dark black liquid dripping down from her soaked jeans in a smeared trail across the floor. The woman stopped struggling at the unmistakable click of a hammer cocking back on a gun, which was produced from her abductor’s suit a second later. She slowly slumped into the seat, and the man gave her a meaningful look before closing the door with a resonant snap of a deadbolt sliding into place. The diner curled his nose at the stench rolling off of the woman as she was deposited into one of the crushed velvet chairs, but almost instantly recovered to offer a cheshire grin.

“Ah, Ms. Imogen Jones. So good of you to make it,” Mr. Grant said.

Imogen stared daggers at the man sitting across from her.

“There’s no need to look so hostile, Ms. Jones. After all, I assume it’s not every night you get to enjoy world class French cuisine. Henri is making our meal for us personally, you see,” Mr. Grant said.

After several long seconds, Imogen tried to speak, only to devolve into a coughing fit that left her reaching for a napkin. Pulling the white cloth away, she carefully folded the crimson stain to hide the incriminating mark from his laughing eyes. Clearing her throat, she spoke with a harsh rasp.

“Enjoy is a strong word.”

“There’s the wit that got you those hundreds of loyal listeners,” Mr. Grant said. “Please, have some water, so this doesn’t turn into a soliloquy.”

Imogen eyed the water in front of her distrustfully.

“We are in my private restaurant, Ms. Jones, one that comes with several industrial-grade processes more than capable of disposing of a body. If I wanted you dead, there would be precious little you could do about it. Your viewers would never get an ending to your story. You’d become the mystery,” Mr. Grant said.

After a long moment of consideration of the water in front of her, Imogen reached across the table and grabbed Mr. Grant’s water glass, eagerly gurgling and then spitting out a slurry of black and red muck into her own. Mr. Grant raised an eyebrow.

“Of course, my offered refreshments come with a cost,” Mr. Grant said.

“They always do with people like you,” Imogen said between gulps.

Mr. Grant smiled sanguinely before continuing.

“Yes, I suppose they frequently do, don’t they,” Mr. Grant said.

Imogen greedily gulped down the rest of the cup. Looking up at Mr. Grant from where she had hunched over the table, he seemed unconcerned as he grabbed another hors d'oeuvre from the two-tiered serving tray that sat to the side of them. Straightening up as much as she could, she let herself breech the silence.

“Well? What’s the price of this little chat?”

“Well, I would like to know about your show. I’ve become quite a fan recently, almost as much of a fan of you as you’ve become of me, I daresay.”

“You want to know what I found. You’re worried.”

“If I were worried, your corpse would be fattening the future bacon for the Tartiflette. No, I’m merely curious, as to what trail of breadcrumbs you followed to get this far.”

“It’s not like it was hard, if you connected the dots.”

“Bullshit. I would recommend telling how you knew what you did about my family before I am no longer the one asking the questions.”

Imogen paused, considering her options for long enough that Mr. Grant had the time to grow bored of the canapes and pull the cloche off the plate between them to reveal the sight and smell of a traditionally prepared Andouillette. Imogen’s stomach turned slightly, although from the rich smell of wine or the reminder of the scent of offal she couldn’t immediately determine. Turning to her captor, she spoke once more.

“I found the Watson Diary.”

“So, the damned thing exists, then.”

“I made copies. I left them with friends.”

Mr. Grant’s eyes narrowed.

“I don’t doubt you made copies, but friends? It’s only us here, Imogen, I’ve seen your social calendar.”

“I left it with other reporters. It’s on file now, there’s no killing it.”

“So, you gave it to a real journalist, then. You’re cleverer than you look.”

Imogen gave him a joyless smile before he smoothed the front of his dining jacket and continued on.

“Well, it sounds like excellent reading. Care to pass along the spark notes?”

“It talks about the circle of power, about how the Grant family fortune was built, the real way, not what you tell everyone. About what was done to Ezra Watson, and from there it wasn’t hard to figure out what led to Gar Watson’s mysterious disappearance.”

“Garfield Watson III was murdered along with my grandfather on a camping trip by some lunatic with a knife. Stories to the contrary are fanciful delusion.”

“Is that the line you’re sticking with? Because I’ve been to the silver room.”

Mr. Grant sat back as he chewed thoughtfully.

“Intriguing. I suppose there’s more to your present state than just the ride over.”

“I only got knocked around a little by my ride in the trunk, thank you. Your goons were perfect gentlemen.”

Mr. Grant smiled coldly.

“The goons prefer the term private security contractor these days.”

“Well, whatever they call themselves, I know what I saw in there.”

“And what precisely did you see in that cave, Ms. Jones?”

“You don’t know?”

“I generally take a dim view of things that would have a deleterious effect on my health. After all, it’s a bit easier to translate a modern fortune into true power through the stock market these days than it is to go chasing after gremlins and magic spells in the middle of cancer clusters, so no, I haven’t been to the actual cave in person.”

“So, you know that the people who get sick in the town are because of the mining company Daddy gave you to kick start all that frugal investing.”

Mr. Grant took a long drink of wine before speaking.

“The EPA doesn’t prosecute based off of fairy tales, Ms. Jones. Please find something more credible to threaten me with, if you choose to go down such a dull avenue of conversation.”

“I think the civil suit is probably what worries you more.”

“Civil suit?”

“That cancer cluster you mentioned. It’s not really cancer, is it? At least not most of it. I talked to the doctors, checked what was being prescribed. It was anti-fungal medication.”

“You’re telling me that the story you’re running with, the one that will ruin me, is that my grandfather thought he was a wizard, opened up a cave and infected the town with fungus? And your damning evidence is what, an uptick in athlete’s foot cream?”

“Your grandfather knew he could use what his failed mining operation uncovered, and he didn’t care who he hurt to make it happen. He ascribed it to magic, but the radio frequency interference in the area, it points to something mechanical.”

“Oh, aliens did it. That’s far more reputable, then.”

“Whatever occult ritual he did with Ezra Watson and tried to do with Gar let him turn his mine around, only he had to keep going back to that cave to make it work. Silver started pouring out of that mine at an absurd rate right at the same time as the ritual happened. The timelines are damning. But a lot of the outside flora and fauna and yes, fungus, got into that cave, and I think it changed it over time into the thing that lives down there.”

Imogen thought she saw a flash of emotion cross Mr. Grant’s face before he smiled thinly. He almost spoke, before taking a sip of wine.

“I think part of that thing might have come back out, Mr. Grant,” Imogen said.

“And you think parts of that thing broke containment, how exactly?” Mr. Grant asked.

“The miners carried it back to their families on their work clothes, miners who didn’t need to be down there because they were just hauling up limestone rocks. The refinery was a sham, wasn’t it? He got the silver from whatever he did down there, and then used the refinery to hide how he got it.”

“So, my grandfather exposed the mine workers to a fungal infection from beyond the stars to hide his crimes of the occult.”

“I think your father tried to do it too, but something went wrong. The mine closed suddenly, just before your father took a trip to Europe all by himself, except I don’t think it was for sightseeing.”

“Oh?”

“It was so he could figure out what went wrong. He became obsessed with it, tried to get better information through occult circles more far afield, but he failed, and you know the result.”

“Now who’s willing the cross the line of criminality to get records they aren’t entitled to look at, if you know about all of that.”

“Just guesswork, actually. But I assumed you’d remember why your dad wasn’t there for your tenth birthday.”

Mr. Grant’s eyes narrowed as he picked up the steak knife from the table. Imogen stiffened at the movement. Seconds later, Mr. Grant grabbed his fork with his other hand with a small smirk. He began calmy dissecting his salmon as he spoke.

“Of course, if all that were true, I guess that makes you rather foolish, does it not? Exposing yourself to something with such a high fatality rate?”

Imogen coughed subconsciously.

“How long do you think you have?” Mr. Grant asked. “Weeks? Days?”

There was an audible click under the table before Imogen dropped her recorder on the table. Mr. Grant’s eyebrows furrowed in annoyance before his eyes flicked to the private contractor standing as still as a statue behind Imogen. At his signal, the man grabbed the offending device off the table before smashing it under his foot. Imogen casually regarded the smashed device before grabbing a canape off of Mr. Grant’s plate and popping it into her mouth.

“And what exactly was that supposed to accomplish?” Mr. Grant asked.

“I’d have figured a tech savvy guy like you would have figured out that recorders can auto save to a cloud storage system,” Imogen said.

Mr. Grant sat back with a grimace and took a deep drink of his wine glass before he responded.

“Well, I suppose this conversation has earned you some leverage. Was that the extent of your play or do you have some vision?”

“I’m betting you have more than foot cream for what I’m going through.”

Mr. Grant let a sly smile cross his face as he turned back to the food in front of him.

“We do. Eight-month regimen. Damn scientists developed it too late for most of the people I had been developing it for, but I kept it handy once they had something usable. Too late for the miners, anyhow.”

Imogen leaned back in her chair before she answered.  

“And the worker’s families?”

“There were a few still alive, the milder cases. We gave it to them under a different name, a generous contribution to the hospital helped smooth things over.”

“Did they get any monetary compensation?”

“It was already a money sink, and doing that admits wrongdoing and opens us up to even more money bleeding into it. Not to mention the amount of attention that kind of thing would attract.”

“If money were the problem, I doubt you would be spending so much of it on this.”

Mr. Grant swirled his wine glass and sighed.

“Money is a means of power. If it sits in a bank vault it’s not doing its job.”

“Maybe put some of it to use cleaning up the area, then. There was a path to where it could get to the river, underground. It needs to be sealed up again.”

Mr. Grant finished his glass before setting it down thoughtfully. Reaching across the table, he offered his hand.

“I trust your discretion on your next choice of podcast.”

 Imogen looked across the table leerily before reaching across the table and shaking the proffered hand. Turning to leave, Mr. Grant’s voice cut her off before she could.

“One last thing before you go.”

Imogen looked back.

“Did you kill it? The thing down there, it took… a lot more than my tenth birthday. Did you kill it?”

“As much as it can be killed, Mr. Grant.”

Mr. Grant nodded.

“The goon will show you out, Ms. Jones.”